The Raspberry Pi Foundation provides resources aimed at teachers teaching five- to 11-year olds.
Joshua Lowe, is the creator of Edublocks and a long-time Raspberry Pi community member.
»INSPIRING A GENERATION
It’s hard to believe that the Raspberry Pi is 10 years old. Over the past decade we’ve seen many amazing community projects. From robots to ventilators helping those in need during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The other, sometimes forgotten side of the Raspberry Pi is its impact on young people taking up STEM careers. I found my own passion for coding through a local Raspberry Jam. My mum, a primary school teaching assistant, also came along with me to various Raspberry Pi events. She later set up a Raspberry Pi club to inspire other kids at her school to take up coding. The club was a great success and saw us travel to numerous Raspberry Pi events to talk about some of the projects we’d built in school. The club also had the chance to visit Raspberry Pi HQ in Cambridge. In 2016 and 2017 we also ran two maker events at the school with hundreds of people attending.
What impact has the Raspberry Pi and this work had on young people choosing STEM careers? Through the Raspberry Pi sparking my interest in coding, I decided to do an apprenticeship as a software developer and have now taken up a career in web development. Children from the Raspberry Pi club are now going down a computer science education route. Without the Raspberry Pi, I wouldn’t have found my passion for coding and in turn I wouldn’t have my career in software development. It’s opened a world of opportunities for so many people when we’ve never needed more engineers, programmers and makers.